I re-read a Trains article about SD70’s from a few years back. It says something to the effect of “railroads love them, because of their 96% availability”. Unfortuneately, there is nothing to compare that against. How does 96% compare to whatever else is out there? Is it a big improvement over diesels of old? What locomotive had the worst availability, a Baldwin Centipede perhaps?
I don’t know what the current benchmarks are, but in the 1970’s (when GE locomotives had a reputation markedly inferior to EMD’s), my SP-hogger in-law told me that U-boats were well down in the 80’s somewhere. Maybe on a road with higher standards of care they weren’t as bad.
96% sounds excellent.
I don’t know about diesel benchmarks - but in the electronics industry we have many manufacturing systems that are as complex and costly as a modern diesel locomotive. If we can maintain 65% availability in 24/7 operation on those we are jumping for joy.
dd
65% for a 24X7 IT Shop? The large iSeries shops I support run in the 97+ range! Outages of greater than 40 minutes get executive review!
Jim
You really can’t compare engines from different eras for a number of reasons. Diesels replaced steam because they required less maintenance hence greater availability. A story in Trains years ago was by an EMD rep assigned to the PRR. They were testing E7’s and didn’t want to take a chance with one of their more important trains so they assigned them to the Detroit Arrow running Harrisburg to Detroit one day and back the next. At one point the rep. told the PRR the wheels needed turning and their response was they must have soft wheels because none of the T1 steam engines needed their wheels turned yet. The reality was the E7’s had run 750,000 miles while the highest mileage on any T1 was in the 200,000 mile range. there was no question they were more efficient and each improvement has made the next generation more efficient so You need to compare engines to engines made in the same era to determine which is the most efficient. You also need to compare new engines to each other. Railroads tend to do the minimum on older engines so their maintenance problems start to occur more frequently. I don’t know the numbers but I would expect GP7,9 and 38 to have very high availability numbers also.
I’m not too sure I’d find it acceptable if my car would not start or I had a flat tire or for some other reason I could not use it to drive to work 4 times every 100 days! A car used to drive to work 250 days per year (5 days per week, minus 2 weeks vacation) would be out of commission 10 days a year at a 96% availability rate.
A car that is in the shop for 4 days every 3 months is known as a “lemon”!
There must be something about comparing apples to oranges in this analogy! ???
Well, if you figure routine maintenance as a whole day where you loose your daily schedule (I am not saying an oil change takes a day, but you do mess up your daily routine), then that would be reasonable. We just drop our car and drive the other while we have the maintenance routine done, which happens about every 3 months or so. That is assuming you don’t do it on the weekends or after the usual work schedule.
Murph, It’s like your car, If you have a new car and perform schedualed maint. then you would probably have 100% availability.
On the other hand if you have a 20 yr old beater and don’t maintain it properly…well… you get my point.
To answer your question though 90-95% availabilty would probably the average for a fleet of average age.
But… with a new car having scheduled maintenance… isn’t that car “unavailable” during that scheduled maintenance? Okay, it requires an oil change every 3 months (a terrible waste of oil in my opinion!) that takes one day (and let’s say you have another car to use that day, so the “unavailability” is not an issue in terms of hardship, but it is still counted as “unavailable”.) That is one day in 92 or about 99% availability.
Would you find it acceptable to be unusable an additional 3 days every 3 months? Would it be acceptable if you took it to the shop, expecting to pick it up that afternoon and then get told to come back next week, it ain’t done yet?
New car or old beater, I’d be finding something more reliable (car and/or repair shop!)!
Every 92 days the FRA requires locomotives to go through an inspection and maintance routine that takes 2 to 3 days.
Nick
Say you have a car that has a few minor issues that you put off until the need is pressing. Then it’d be ‘out of service’ perhaps for as much as a couple of days. If that happens once a year or so that’s still (averaging) 6 months of service between interruptions. I’d say that’s typical, at least in my experience. Mufflers, shocks, alternator/water pump, belts hoses…etc. Things that are wear and tear worn out need to be replaced and sometimes you can’t help when they go-they just do! I’d imagine a locomotive is not a whole lot different.
Yeah,
But how often do you slam your car into stationary objects at 4 mph?
Or tow, say the equivalent of 10 semi trailers at once, every day?
Is your cars engine running over 75% of the time, or does it get a rest between trips?
Locomotives are designed for much more daily abuse than your car suffers in it lifetime.
96 to 97% availability on any model locomotive is fantastic, when you consider the abuse they undergo.
Exactly my (roundabout I guess) point. They’re made to only be down for a little bit. Otherwise they’d be really expensive paperweights!
I knew I was thinking in the realm of apples and oranges with this 96% availability. It is not necessarily a “number of uses” thing. More like number of miles you get out of one engine vs the number of miles you get out of all the rest, or the ‘best’, or the best one could expect.
I also see the regular required inspections thing as being a part of it, too. If you have to take it out of commission 2 or 3 days every 3 months that does not leave much for breakdown times.
BUT, I still wonder about you folk that find it acceptable to have to replace one part of your car (mufflers, shocks, alternator/water pump, belts hoses…etc.) once a year. I’ve had cars that have NEVER been into the shop, and no, “I” didn’t fix/mainain them on weekends, either. My wife drove a particular car of ours for 7 years and since she was driving it, I never thought about tires or oil changes or NUTTIN’! When we divorced, I got THAT car and drove it another 7 years and still never thought about oil or regular maintenance. I just bought tires for it once (1 hour at Sears). Note… NO oil changes, NO filters, NO broken parts, NO nuttin, for 14 years! Yes, I did put washer fluid in it once a year and gas twice a month, and new tires once in 14 years. I got rid of it because the seats were so worn the springs were wearing holes in my pants! Those of you having to repair your car once a year should see about a different car!!![C):-)]
And, yes, I’ve had a car that required many trips to the shop to get it to an acceptable level of use… after too many times to one shop it sure seemed that THEY were breaking things so I’d have to come back. Take it in for brakes and then have to fix the water pump, then have to have the power steering replaced too, then the master brake cylinder, then the alternator, then the muffler has a h
So then, is 96% a whole lot better than the competition, or what they replaced?
Seem to remember this being the basis for the whole argument as to whether EMD or GE is better:
GE - Cheaper than an EMD but maintenance is more frequent and not always easy to perform. They also didn’t seem to last as long as EMD’s (historically, at least). Still see a ton of SD40-2 locos out there, but I don’t see any U-boats.
EMD - More expensive up front but cheaper to maintain and more maintenance friendly. They also last for a mighty long time.
Oh God, not this GE vs EMD thing again…
But since it was brought up, GEs are not harder to maintain than EMDs, they are just different to maintain. When EMD was the majority builder by far (20+ years ago) most railroads simply did not want to take the time to maintain their limited amounts of GEs properly. It was simply easier to “dispose” of them when they were worn out. Now with GE’s advanced technology and better fuel efficiency, the shoe is on the other foot. Most Class 1 are used to the GE maintainence requirements, and they can’t dispose of their old fuel hog, rattle-trap EMDs fast enough.
The SD70s, especially the MACs, aren’t aging well at all. A properly maintained Dash9/AC4400/GEVO can take a heck of a lot more abuse than an EMD.
Rest assured, I wasn’t making that statement based on the big EMD-GE tiff that a few of our knowledgable forum compatriots had a while back. That was based on my father in law, who worked for Soo back in Shoreham shops about 20 years ago. They hated GE’s. They were hard to work on, and their availability never matched EMD. From what I have read recently, the reason EMD’s cost more is because they are built for reliability. GE’s are built for cheap horsepower. RR’s today basically chose between cheaper horsepower and increased maintenance, or more expensive machines with lower maintenance. Performance-wise on the road they appear to be about the same.
Comparing auto vs. locomotive availability is indeed an apples vs. oranges comparison. Your average automobile is overdesigned for its duty cycle in order to minimize maintenance requirements. Most truck and locomotive/marine diesel engines are designed with a higher level of maintenance in mind, a certain amount of shop time is expected.
How often do you pull the cylinder heads from the engine of your Dodge Magnum to inspect the cylinder linings and piston rings for wear?
Scheduled events are not part of the formulea, A shop margin is designed for that .